1. The new Xen Hypervisor 4.4 which was released yesterday improves the performance, scalability and the support for ARM based processors. Contibuters like Citrix, AMD, Intel, SUSE and oracle increases the Xen hypervisor support to a range of hardwares.
2.”There is a lot of interest in ARM based virtualization, both for the micro servers and for the embedded space”said George Dunlap, a Xen Project Contributer.
3. Newly supported ARM based systems includes Tis OMAP5 and AppliedMicro’s X-gene 64-bit ARM SoC (System on Chip) which is used in Dell’s Proof-of-concept ARM based “microserver”- The Calxeda ECX-2000.
4. The Application Binary Interface(ABI) provided in t Xen 4.4 is more stable than previous versions. Previous versions also could run on ARM chips. But this stable version will increase the performance and stability using this more stable ABI, which links the underlying Hardware and the Guest OS.
5. “Any guest that is designed to run on ARM in Xen 4.4 will be able to run on future Xen hypervisors,” Dunlap said.
6. The ARM specific Bootloaders and firmware interfaces received improvements. Also the Physical partitions and LVM volumes to store virtual disks also received updates. The scalability also increased in this version to support x86 based high volume services like Amazon EC2 and ARM based microservers.
7. For the last few years “the Xen being ported to ARM “ buzz is around the corner. At the beginning of the effort, Xen was targeted to Run in 32-bit ARMv7 architecture. But now, Xen supports 64-bit guests in ARMv8 architecture.
8. Xen hypervisor 4.4 also removes a limitation on x86 processors that limits only 200 VMs on a Single host. So, servers with 128 or 256 processor cores can leverage this hypervisor version to run 1000s of Virtual Machines in a host.
9. Xen was previously a Citrix project, which was then donated to The Linux Foundation in April 2013 to attract contributors.
10. ARM based servers becoming a Reality. We can expect Greener IT datacenters around the world by reducing the energy consumption using ARM based servers.